A developer's blog on AIR, Flex, Flash, and other Adobe technology

Archive for September, 2009

If you’ve created an AIR, Flash, or Flex app and dealt with text and user input, you’ve probably looked around for a spell checking solution. There have been some great third-party spell checkers for some time now, with the widest-adopted perhaps being Grant Skinner’s Spelling Plus Library.

Today, however, you can use a spell checking engine called “Squiggly,” released by Adobe and available for free on Adobe Labs! It’s important to note that Squiggly is a preliminary release and is officially unsupported. If you need support or a commercial solution, I recommend checking out Grant Skinner’s SPL.

Squiggly works with AIR, Flex, or pure AS3 apps.
You can see a live demo here.

Using it in your project is quite easy, and requires two things:

A compiled dictionary (usa.zwl is included)

The AdobeSpelling.swc library

The dictionary: You have two choices. You can either use the English dictionary that ships with Squiggly, or use the DictionaryGenerator.air utility to compile your own from a word list. Note that the spell checking heuristics used to determine alternate words is currently based on English phonological rules…meaning that if you pick a non-English dictionary, the suggestions won’t work. Multi-lingual support is planned for future releases. In either case, take the dictionary.zwl and put it in your application path. For example, in a folder called “assets.”The library: Place AdobeSpelling.swc in your project’s libs folder, or be sure to append its location to the library path.

You can now call the Squiggly APIs from your application.
If you want to create a spell-checking enabled Halo TextArea or RichText, use the included SpellUI.enableSpelling function, like so:

If you’re not using Flex or you’re designing your own components, you can call the underlying engine by creating a SpellingDictionary and SpellChecker object. To check a given word, for example:

Note that loading the usa.zwl dictionary is an asynchronous event, and is accomplished by using a URLRequest and waiting for Event.COMPLETE to be dispatched.

Squiggly is highly optimized and very fast, and future versions will only improve upon this beta. Please try it out and post your comments or problems in the forums, which I and other Adobe employees will be monitoring.